The canyon was narrowing and the river stretches between bends were getting longer while the bends were tighter. We began this day to traverse the upper part of what the wranglers call “The Narrows.” The canyon walls were intermittently higher and the big alcove bends characteristic of the lower Escalante River near Glen Canyon had begun. There were also more short side canyons.

I turned and wandered into one canyon on the left at right angles to the river. Suddenly, another sharp bend next to a large sand slope looked promising, with a narrow bottom and high walls, cottonwoods, box elders and a few Gambel oaks. About two miles up this canyon, it ended abruptly, but there was a small, hard to see passage between two huge angular boulders. I entered the chamber, which was not unlike Cathedral in the Desert—its equal in quality, though not in size.

The vaulted roof was not so soaring and the dimensions of the chamber much less, but the same feeling of remote, secret beauty was there. At the bottom sat likewise a plunge pool for reflections and the beauty of a curved sandbar. This pool was fed by a now-dry set of chute-like chimneys in the roof, rather than a waterfall, like Cathedral in the Desert. The chimneys, one alone and a double-barreled one next to it, were beautifully water-sculptured and made me wish there was some way to ascend to the level of the chimneys to see the carved stream channel above. I spent perhaps two hours there, then left reluctantly, but elated to find this chamber well out of reach of “Lake” Powell’s inundation.

I continued back to the river, then down canyon, crossing through the water back and forth innumerable times. The canyon was really narrow by then and the walls were more impressive, creating a chamber of darkness with a thin strip of sky above. I wandered on, past some sharp bends with great sandstone columns and overhangs. I kept on past the “Wrinkled Eyes,” two rounded out holes high in the wall of the left bank. I passed 25 Mile Canyon, but at first I started into its mouth, went 100 feet or so, reflected on the hour and decided to head for camp instead.

I was the last man in. Campers were having their soup in their Sierra Club cups beneath a deep red cliff perhaps 350 feet high that was catching the last rays of the sun. I ate and then made my bed among the limbs of a medium-sized cottonwood tree—a leafy bower with a sandy floor and more privacy than usual. It was cloudy again with stars and blowing broken clouds overhead, their moisture too diminished by the time they reached us to dump any, though it looked a bit threatening at times. My tarp was ready to be rigged, but no drops came and I slept.

Book Review on the Biggest Conservation Story of All Time and New Solutions… Resurrection: Glen Canyon and a New Vision for the American West by Annette McGivney with Photographs by James Kay and Foreword by Bill McKibben (Braided River, 2009)

How We Lost Glen Canyon

In the mid 1950s, David Brower, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, led a coalition of conservation groups in an effort to permanently banish industrial development from national park lands. The primary battle defending the sanctity of the national park system was over two dams proposed inside Dinosaur National Monument. The proposed dams in Dinosaur would have flooded 96 out of 104 river miles in the monument on the Yampa and Green Rivers.

David Brower in Congressional testimony used 9th Grade math to prove that if Glen Canyon Dam were higher, it could hold back and store more water than both proposed dams in Dinosaur. Congress removed the two dams in Dinosaur National Monument from the Colorado River Compact and passed the bill approving the construction of Glen Canyon Dam. Having never seen Glen Canyon, David Brower and many others did not know the extent or nature of the sacrifice made to protect the national park system. Looking back, especially after he floated through Glen Canyon on the Colorado River for the first time in 1958, David Brower mused that he and the coalition might have pushed on and possibly succeeded in saving Glen Canyon. (For more on David Brower see the blog post, “David Brower: Photographer and Environmentalist 1.”

Ironically, before World War II, Glen Canyon had been part of a proposed national park that would have encompassed more than two million acres spread across much of Southeastern Utah including most of what are now Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Capitol Reef National Park and all of Glen Canyon. The attack on Pearl Harbor interrupted these discussions and turned the attention of Congress to preparations for war.

Drought, Distortions, Glen Canyon Dam And A New Dream Of The West

The Bureau of Reclamation closed the gates on Glen Canyon Dam in 1964, but “Lake” Powell did not reach full capacity until 1980. The reservoir water level ebbed and flowed until the last time it was full in 1996, then drew down over 100 feet by 2003 and has remained nearly half empty or more than half empty ever since. It turns out that the Colorado River flow calculations that justified the building of Glen Canyon Dam in the first place were exaggerated, as were the rainfall estimates on which expansion and development interests based the entire settlement of the Western US plains and Southwestern desert. Tree ring studies and other climate measures show that the 20th Century was one of the wettest ever in the Western US. Today’s much lower rainfall and river flow rates are more characteristic of the region, though big dam proponents are officially calling the present conditions a drought. Nonetheless, scientists project that “Lake” Powell may never be full again. Odds are that both “Lake” Mead and “Lake” Powell will both remain as they are now, roughly half full or less for the foreseeable future.

Annette McGivney, in Resurrection: Glen Canyon and a New Vision for the American West, tells the story of the loss of Glen Canyon, but more importantly the rebirth of life in the side canyons since the reservoir has subsided. Glen Canyon today is the poster child for watershed recovery for both Glen and Grand Canyon, as well as for the resilience of nature in general. McGivney’s easy-flowing text accompanies the photography of James Kay, who for more than three decades has photographed the Colorado Plateau, the seismically uplifted high desert that the Colorado River cuts through in Utah and Arizona. James Kay knows this land and these canyons. His sensitive, artistic eye finds for us the devastation that was, and the haunting, unparalleled paradise that is Glen Canyon.

McGivney and Kay explored many of the tributary canyons together for this project, either by boat, by kayak, but most often on foot, backpacking from the reservoir up canyon; or from the rims of the sandstone tablelands above, down into narrow, winding passages and rock alcoves. These slot canyons, often hundreds of feet tall and in places only a few feet wide, are already verdant with newly rooted cottonwoods, willows, and grasses, as well as teaming with wildlife just as they had been for centuries before everything drowned under the full reservoir.

Annette McGivney quotes Richard Ingebretsen, co-founder with David Brower of Glen Canyon Institute, who asked, “Why keep two reservoirs half empty?” Glen Canyon Institute, founded for the ultimate purpose of reclaiming Glen Canyon and turning it into a national park, is working on a current campaign called, “Fill Mead First.” The idea is to keep “Lake” Mead full because it supplies many cities of the Southwest with water and generates their electricity. If “Lake” Powell were then drawn down, Glen Canyon could be restored and even made into a national park. Many who saw Glen Canyon before the reservoir say that it rivaled the Grand Canyon in beauty.

Canyon Photography On Par With The Best Ever

James Kay’s photographs in Resurrection certainly provide the proof of this claim to canyon beauty. Traveling by Kayak, powerboat and most often on foot, Kay has shown us as never before, the side canyons and back alcoves of Glen Canyon reborn. His style is both effectively documentary, yet artistically strong. Kay’s experience in the canyons of the Southwest has given him not just an eye for form; he has an eye for gracefully capturing the forms of canyons. His understanding of natural light and how to use it to best portray the curves, edges, near and far, contrasts, shadows and indirect illumination of layers on layers of weather-sculpted sandstone.

Some of Kay’s compositions are simple. For example, one photograph in Resurrection depicts a massive wall of rock that juts out into “Lake” Powell like the prow of a ship. The vantage point of the image is from a boat close to water level. At the bottom of the wall that is about 200 feet tall, we see a small boat dwarfed by the immensity of stone above. The photograph is a work of beauty, while at the same time it accomplishes the practical task of dramatizing just how far the reservoir has receded from the high water line marked by a gray-tan mud stain, or “bathtub ring,” as people call it. The top half of the cliff is the beautiful red-brown of native rock, while the bottom half of the cliff is coated with ugly mud stain.

Other images give us the haunting, far away longing of luminous reflections or newly sprouted grasses, shrubs, cottonwoods and other lush greenery. Some photographs are purposely ugly, some are otherworldly and nearly abstract, while still others incorporate hikers in soaring walled narrows or show us intimate rushing water. If you love the desert and canyons, this is a book and a place different. Yet despite how unusual this place is, those who see it as nothing more than a holding tank, a cash register or a recreation area for motorized tourism, have seemingly never stopped to see it the way James Kay shares it.

The Desert, Progress, Jobs, Money And Other Myths

Despite US Bureau of Reclamation and pro-development rhetoric, the only two justifiable reasons Glen Canyon Dam was ever necessary, and remotely remains necessary, were the Politics surrounding the agreement between the seven Western states that share the water; and the Income from recreation on “Lake” Powell. The viability of Hydropower generation has nearly run out with low water levels often not providing enough gravity water drop to turn the turbines at sufficient speed. Besides, the 1992 Grand Canyon Protection Act no longer allows the fluctuation of water levels caused by increased dam releases during peak power usage.

Politically in relation to water use, the three Upper Colorado River Basin states: Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, for good reason mistrust the four lower basin states: California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. The lower basin states have all along taken more than their share of Colorado River water. Glen Canyon Dam provides a physical obstruction by which the upper states can regulate the flow to the lower states and keep them from taking more than their allotment, if and when the upper states catch up with the lower states in their land development and thirst for water.

Even though the desert does not inherently provide the water to support the building of industry and commercial buildings, suburbs, golf courses, and abundant water features, the seven Western states of the Colorado River system have been in a race to develop as fast as they can to be sure they obtain as much Colorado River water as possible in relation to the neighboring states. John Wesley Powell, whom the reservoir was named after, warned against developing the West beyond its water capacity. He recommended a number of water saving approaches that have been implemented by a few wise communities, but ignored by most.

Indeed, McGivney reminds us that the cities of the desert tend to flaunt the image of the manufactured oasis. The Phoenix Convention and Visitors Bureau in 2005 adopted the slogan, “The Desert is a Myth.” A July hike in any direction beyond the edge of a Phoenix suburb like Anthem, for instance, and it becomes readily apparent that the desert is real and it is the lush golf courses that perhaps are already, or soon will be a mirage. Land development in the West has achieved similar temporary high profits and blindness to long-term consequences as recent Wall Street derivative speculation and the banking system near meltdown.

Nonetheless, it is less the cities that would run dry without “Lake” Powell than the farming of water-intensive crops like alfalfa, hay and cotton, grown not to supply market demand, but to take advantage of government subsidies and tax breaks. Dams are portrayed as symbolizing progress and economic growth, but special interests are the primary benefactors. In Utah, for example, mining, ranching and industrial agriculture represent less than 3% of the economy, but they use 85% of Utah’s water. Even though industrial agriculture comprises a decreasing portion of the Western economy, the industry is one of the largest contributors to political campaigns. Thus, even though dam projects, expanded water pipelines and other water infrastructure will not sustain society long-term, these outdated public works continue to garner support of those in political power.

A Dying Motor Tourism Industry And The Future

Cathedral In The Desert, Glen Canyon, Utah, copyright 1964 Philip Hyde. Named one of the top 100 photographs of the 20th Century. James Kay used this photograph side-by-side with his own like this in the book Resurrection too.

Cathedral in the Desert, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, copyright 2005 James Kay. Water level of Lake Powell near the lowest point, with the Cathedral almost fully recovered as only a few feet of water were left in the bottom.

The motorized brand of tourism that thrived on “Lake” Powell in the 1980s and 1990s, has generated significant income for concessionaires and boat operators, who also provide proportionally large support to politicians and boost the local economy. In 1992, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area hosted a record 3.5 million visitors, nearly as many at this peak as visited the Grand Canyon. Yet today with the shrinkage of the “lake” area, the closure of two out of five of the marinas and high gasoline prices area hotel stays and other tourism has dropped by 40 percent. Nearby national parks such as the Grand Canyon and Zion each increased visitation in the last decade. Indeed, the economy is playing a major role in the dying of motorized tourism nearly everywhere. Less disposable income, especially among the upper-middle class and upper class has led to less motorized lake recreation. In the past many high earning tourists have spent discretionary money on Jet Skis, Houseboat shares and other expensive water toys, but in the last 10 years public lands hiking and camping has grown, while motor boating has decreased significantly. Local jobs in Page, Arizona and elsewhere around “Lake” Powell have depended almost entirely on motor tourism. Most local people, including the Native Americans in the area, want to prolong a dying industry to maintain their livelihoods. While denying that their way of life is dying, they are likely missing the opportunities and shift in perspective that could bring them a far more sustainable, Earth-friendly and perhaps most importantly, a more permanent security.

McGivney’s “Step-by-step guide to saving Glen Canyon and then, perhaps the world” offers the kind of forward thinking solutions that thought leaders have begun to discuss in recent years. While these innovative resolutions will become requirements, rather than options in the near future, as a civilization we have a big leap to negotiate before we are ready to leave our self-serving short-term approaches behind and move into a mindset that is more conducive to sustaining our society and all life on Earth. This is perhaps the text’s only flaw, or perhaps it is more of a challenge: the leap from where our watershed management and environmental stewardship are now to where they need to be to sustain life in the Southwest and on Earth long range may be too big. Are we up to the task? Perhaps an even better question is: can we learn to cooperate with, listen to, find new ways to meet the needs of and educate those who have a vested interest in business as it has been for far too long?

Announcing The Grand Opening Of The Capitol Arts Gallery

525 Main Street Across From The County Courthouse
Quincy, California 95971
530-283-3402

Opening Reception 5:00-7:00 pm June 29, 2012

Group Exhibition June 29, 2012 Through August 22, 2012

Mount Hough, Arlington Ridge And Cottonwoods Across Indian Valley, Plumas County, Northern Sierra Nevada, California, copyright 2009 by David Leland Hyde. A 16X24 archival print of this photograph will participate in the Capitol Arts Center Grand Opening Show. The Plumas Arts Grand Opening Group Exhibition is the first time David Leland Hyde’s photography has been exhibited in a “brick and mortar” venue. David Leland Hyde was born in Plumas County. He is the son of pioneer landscape photographer Philip Hyde, who lived in Plumas County for 56 years. Philip Hyde was one of the founders of the Plumas County Museum. He hired the architect of the Plumas County Museum and was active in local community affairs including being a member of the nationally acclaimed Quincy Library Group that created a bridge between environmentalists and timber interests. For more on Philip Hyde click on his name in the main text.

The history of art, local Plumas County artists, Plumas Arts and the history of watering holes, bars, taverns, drinking establishments, clubs and historic saloons converged last year and will culminate in a new Grand Opening of the Capitol Art Gallery at 525 Main Street in downtown Quincy, California, the county seat of Plumas county.

The historic two-story Capitol Saloon, established in 1873 by Andrew “Doc” Hall, thrived for over a century and a quarter before falling on hard times in recent years. The Capitol Club, as it was later called, stood vacant until the 25-year-old Quincy, California based art association, Plumas Arts, bought the building outright for $70,500 in September 2011 and paid its back taxes, reinventing the premises as The Capitol Art Gallery.

The Capitol Arts Gallery opened on May 4, 2011 with a rare local exhibition by internationally recognized landscape photographer Carr Clifton. The Grand Opening of the Capitol Arts Gallery and opening reception will be this evening, Friday, June 29, 2012 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. Carr Clifton’s opening reception and the gala Grand Opening this evening may be the most colorful and captivating events in the long history of “The Cap” besides “A spectacular shoot-out that occurred in front of the saloon in February 1886, resulting in the death of one man and the ostracizing of the other,” historically recounted by Las Plumas of the Plumas County Museum Association, which pioneer landscape photographer Philip Hyde helped found.

Philip Hyde and his son David Leland Hyde will be just two of more than 35 local artists, whose art will appear in the Grand Opening Exhibition. Philip Hyde’s “Cathedral In The Desert,” that American Photo Magazine named one of the top 100 photographs of the 20th century will be in the show as well as “The Minarets,” that Ansel Adams said he liked better than his own photograph of the Minarets, as well as “Misty Morning, Indian Creek” and “Spanish Creek” will appear in the show. David Leland Hyde’s “Grasses, Clouds Reflected, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park, California” and “Mount Hough, Arlington Ridge And Cottonwoods Across Indian Valley” will also hang in the exhibition. When asked which artists might be of interest to a national and international audience, Plumas Arts’ Executive Director for over 25 years, Roxanne Valladao replied, “They all are. It’s not fair for me to say which artists are more important or more interesting than the others. The show represents all of our members that wanted to be in the show.” Indeed the Plumas Arts membership is “diverse and talented,” reported the Feather River Bulletin and Indian Valley Record. “The exhibition will feature two dimensional and three dimensional fine art and artisan creations in wood, basketry, pottery and jewelry… Plumas Arts will also use the evening to offer recognition to the generous individuals and groups that offered financial and volunteer support… All who made a financial donation of $100 or more or offered volunteer labor will be given a fine art print of Indian Creek by late local artist bob Pfenning.”

Executive Director Roxanne Valladao said that 36 people so far have donated their time and 57 people have donated money to the “Place of Our Own” fund that became the Capitol Arts Gallery. The California Arts Council article on Plumas Arts said that after decades of saving, sacrificing and fundraising, Plumas Arts was in the fortuitous position to take advantage of a foreclosure auction to purchase the Capitol Club. Donations paid for the bulk of renovations while dozens of volunteers cleaned, dumped trash, demolished walls, replaced rotted floors and walls, painted, polished and redesigned the space into a beautiful contemporary art gallery space that still retains the charm of the historical building as well. Organizations such as the California Arts Council, the Plumas County Board of Supervisors, Feather River College, Pacific Gas & Electric, High Sierra Music Foundation and a number of other local and state organizations contributed funding or expertise to the project. A gorgeous wood floor installation that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars came together under the efforts of Feather River College Students in Free Enterprise, also known as S.I.F.E., with a LOWE’s foundation grant.

As said in the California Arts Council organ ArtWorks, “For a rural arts council in one of the most economically challenged, least populated (Plumas County’s population is 20,000), and geographically isolated counties in the state, the notion of owning such a part of local history might seem part of a dreamscape.” However, local artists have earned this dream. Artists in Plumas County who support Plumas Arts range in experience, schooling, expertise, recognition and fame, but they all have actively participated in the development of the arts in Quincy and in the entire county. Plumas Arts members hail from the Plumas County communities of Quincy, Portola, Greenville, Chester, Taylorsville, Crescent Mills, Canyon Dam, Hamilton Branch, Westwood, Graeagle, Blairsden, Loyalton, Belden, Bucks Lake, Meadow Valley, Cromberg, Johnsville, Lake Almanor, Tobin, Twain and others. The Capitol Art Gallery is now open Wednesday through Friday 11:00 am to 5:30 pm and Saturday from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.

This exhibition features works deploying the visual power of photography to communicate and understand an appreciation of the great American Wilderness. These photographers have captured the beauty and form of nature using straight photography, documentary, pictorialism, abstraction and unusual lighting effect to communicate a story or to stimulate the viewer’s innate imagination. The work involved often has provided the foundation for major conservation campaigns.

The world’s best archival digital prints STARTING AT $99.00… for a limited time and number…

Reflection Pool, Curved Sandbar, Forming Arches, Escalante River Side Canyon, Escalante Wilderness, now Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah, copyright 1968 by Philip Hyde. Never before printed or published. Intended for use in the book “Slickrock,” by Edward Abbey and Philip Hyde, but damaged before processing.

This photograph has never been printed before. It was partly damaged and unprintable in the film era. With new digital print restoring techniques, this one of a kind historical photograph is now available as an archival fine art digital print. A leading professional photo lab masterfully high resolution drum scanned Philip Hyde’s original 4X5 large format Ektachrome color transparency. This provided an 834 MB digital file far superior to any digital capture made today. From the drum scan, master landscape photographer, Photoshop expert and printer Carr Clifton carefully restored the image and crafted an exquisite print file.

The Photograph’s Historical Significance

The groundbreaking Sierra Club Books Exhibit Format Series popularized the coffee table photography book, set the standards for composition and technique for a generation of landscape photographers, brought color to landscape photography and helped to make many national parks and wilderness areas in the American West during the late 1950s, 1960s and the early 1970s. Ansel Adams, David Brower and Nancy Newhall invented the series, Eliot Porter was the best-selling book photographer, but according to an Outdoor Photographer article by Lewis Kemper in 1989, Philip Hyde was the go-to man for David Brower, series editor and Sierra Club Executive Director. More Philip Hyde’s photographs appeared in more books in the series than any other photographer. Right after Philip Hyde’s Navajo Wildlands: As Long As the Rivers Shall Run came out in 1967, Philip Hyde had already begun work on another Southwest book that became the classic Slickrock: The Canyon Country of Southeast Utah with Edward Abbey. Slickrock would be published to help build support for wilderness or national park protection of the Escalante River and for areas around Canyonlands National Park eventually added to the national park.

From Philip Hyde’s Solo Escalante Travel Log, Participating In A Sierra Club Back Country Backpack, Spring 1968: Written By Philip Hyde

May 1:Utah: Escalante Wilderness: Gates Cabin camp to the camp below 25 Mile Canyon. The Escalante River Canyon narrowed, while the bends in the river lengthened and became tighter in the corners. We began today to traverse the upper part of what the wranglers call “The Narrows.” The canyon walls were intermittently higher and the big alcoves in the ends of the river bends began to resemble the characteristics of the lower Escalante River. There were more short side canyons. I went into one on the left, entering at right angles to the Escalante River. Suddenly it turned sharply at a large sand slope. The side canyon looked promising, with a narrow bottom, high walls, cottonwoods, box elders and a few Gambel’s Oaks.

About two miles up the side canyon ended abruptly. I crawled under a passage between two huge angular boulders and entered a chamber not unlike Cathedral in the Desert in Glen Canyon, Utah. This water hollowed canyon chamber was Cathedral in the Desert’s equal in quality but not in size. The vaulted roof was not as soaring and the dimensions of the chamber were much less than Cathedral in the Desert, but this canyon chamber had much the same feeling of remote solitude and secret beauty. There was likewise a plunge pool for reflections and a magnificent sandbar with a long, graceful curve. This pool was fed by a now dry set of chute like “chimneys” in the “roof,” rather than a waterfall as in Cathedral in the Desert. The two “chimneys,” side-by-side, one and then a double-barreled one next to it, are beautifully water-sculptured. These forms make me wish there were some way to ascend to the level of the “chimneys” to see the carved stream channel above.

I spent about two hours in the canyon mini cathedral and left reluctantly. I was elated to find this chamber where it is well out of reach of “Lake” Powell’s high water inundations. I continued back to the Escalante River, then down canyon, crossing the river innumerable times. The canyon was narrowing dramatically and the walls became higher and more impressive. I walked past some sharp bends in the canyon with great sandstone columns and overhangs. Down past the “winking eyes,” two rounded out holes high in the wall of the left bank. Past 25 Mile Canyon. I started into the mouth of 25 Mile Canyon, sauntered in about one hundred feet or so, reflected on the hour and decided to head for camp instead.

I was the last man in and Sierra Club campers were having their soup beneath the deep red cliff, perhaps 35 feet high that was catching the last rays of the sun. I ate and then made my bed among the limbs of a medium-sized cottonwood—a leafy bower with sandy floor and more privacy than usual. In my sleeping bag looking up at the sky, I saw it was cloudy again, with broken clouds blowing overhead, their moisture too diminished by the time they reached us to dump any rain, though it looked threatening at times all day. My tarp was ready to be rigged but no drops came and I slept.

By Contributing Editor Philip Hyde

I was introduced to the canyon country in 1951 as the controversy over the Upper Colorado River Storage Project was warming. I was commissioned by the Sierra Club to find out what was in Dinosaur, and bring back photographs of it. On the way home, I had glimpses of other parts of the canyon country: following the wheel tracks of uranium trucks on the then primitive road through Monument Valley, and a stop at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I remember well the landscape shock that the early geologist Dutton said comes to those from well watered regions when they first confront the Plateau Province. The heat, haze and dryness that dulled my mind, fogged the shadows of my photographs and obscured the vast distances were still leaving their imprint on me when I made my first river trip through Glen Canyon four years later, but there were more important things leaving their imprints, too. The light! The bare rock forms of the land, and the color! These began to impress me more than the discomforts and initial strangeness. Those early impressions formed the core of my feeling for this country and programmed me for my continuing preoccupation with it.

In the spring of 1962, several years after politics had decided that the main artery of the wild Colorado would be bled for kilowatts, I backpacked in to Rainbow Bridge to help in a study that sought ways of protecting this magnificent natural span of stone from the coming encroachment of the reservoir. Later, in June, a second float trip from Hite to Lee’s Ferry really got me into Glen Canyon. Our itinerary was made up of places that must be seen for the last time, for a short time later the gates of Glen Canyon Dam’s diversion tunnels were to be closed and the great canyon condemned to drown.

In 1964, I got my first real look at Escalante Canyon and its tributaries on the last half of a trip that started out as a wake for Glen Canyon. Paddling off from Wahweap on 200-plus feet of water, we floated over the roof of Music Temple and peered through the green water trying vainly to see the great overhang in Moqui Canyon, marked now only by the top of the curve. Floating through the narrows of Aztec Canyon, we landed a short distance below Rainbow Bridge and strode up to pay our respects.

Continuing up the lake, as we entered between the high walls of the Escalante Arm we watched a great sand dune collapsing, undercut by the rising waters. We found Clear Creek just out of the rising pool below the entrance to the Cathedral in the Desert, so we saw the Cathedral pristine, but we learned later that summer that the water had come in and flushed out the lovely green moss carpet on the floor of that great vaulted stone chamber. This June, the last vestiges of the Cathedral were flooded.

We boated past the entrances of half-drowned Davis Gulch and Soda Gulch—too late—straining to imagine their vanishing beauty. In Soda Gulch, we found the water lapping at the base of Gregory Natural Bridge—one named glory among uncounted unnamed glories flickering out.

That sample of the Escalante River Canyon made me want to see more of it, but I wanted to explore a part that wasn’t condemned. So when the opportunity came a few years later to walk down the Escalante River from Harris Wash and back out through Coyote Gulch, I leapt at it. Finding arches and grottoes, plunge pools and great overhanging walls, small waterfalls and desert varnished cliffs—two marvelous weeks of it—was like finding again an old friend you’d thought dead.

You ask me to tell you why the flooding of Coyote’s mouth is a blow? I can only answer that it is quite possible to love a piece of country as one would love a friend, and grieve perhaps nearly as much when it is taken from you.

Twice I have returned to Escalante-Coyote country since that walk down the river. A number of times I have just driven by the edge to look into it, on the way to somewhere else. Wherever I travel in the canyon country, I find myself comparing new impressions to those first excited glimpses, much as you might compare new loves with your first romance. Emotional? Yes, but what finer emotion is there than love? This planet needs more of its people’s love, and less of some other emotions such as greed, or mankind may cease to be its people.

I am not really worried about the planet. It has survived countless cataclysms over the eons of geologic time, and I am certain it can survive the worst that humans can do to it. The planet does not need us as much as we need it. We need unpolluted air and water. We need the life support systems that nature provides. Man, with all his expensive, high-powered technology, can only imitate. And we need the spiritual stimulus that wilderness gives us to continue to grow as humans. The “good life” must include wild nature for our spirits, as well as unfouled nests, or mankind will simply become one of history’s extinct species. So, burn another candle to the memory of Glen Canyon, and listen to the bells, as John Donne urges. They toll for you and me.

To read more about and view Philip Hyde’s landscape photography of Glen Canyon see the blog post, “Glen Canyon Portfolio.”

Afterward (December 2010)

“Lake” Powell after taking 17 years to reach full capacity in 1980 remained more or less full for less than 15 years. Starting with droughts in the late 1990s, and reaching an all-time low in 2003-2004, the water level in Glen Canyon ranges between 50 and 100 feet down from its 1980 apogee. Experts now say that “Lake” Powell will most probably never fill completely again, due to evaporation, over-commitment of Colorado River water, recurring droughts and climate change. A movement is gaining momentum for removing dams that destroy river ecosystems and do not live up to their economic promises. See the blog post, “A River Will Run Through It.” Future blog posts will also include reviews of two new books on Glen Canyon that offer the history and a new outlook for the future:

Why did the pair spend one third of their lives pursuing this unusual brand of adventure?

As the 1950s became the 1960s, groups like the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, the Izaak Walton League, the National Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation brought public attention to protecting and enjoying nature. Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society authored the Wilderness Act legally defining wilderness. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Springcame out in protest of chemical spraying and exposed corporate environmental negligence. The same year, Sierra Club Books released In Wildness Is The Preservation of the World with color photographs by Eliot Porter with quotes from Henry David Thoreau and Island in time: The Point Reyes Peninsula by Harold Gilliam with photographs by Philip Hyde. These were the first two widely distributed books with large color fine art landscape photographs sharing the beauty of nature. While Eliot Porter’s book was all color, Philip Hyde mixed beautiful vintage black and white photographs with large color plates. Dad was recognized as a master of both mediums, though as color caught on, Porter’s book sold more copies. A handful of photographers, through the Sierra Club and its leader David Brower, brought wilderness right to the United States Congress and Senate and into living rooms across the country. The Sierra Club had reinvented the large picture book as the Exhibit Format Series. These high-quality coffee table volumes represented, as never before, the wild places the Sierra Club wanted to protect.

Photographs first helped preserve wilderness in 1864, moving President Abraham Lincoln to establish Yosemite as the world’s first scenic land preserve. Yet in the 1950s and 1960s the use of the camera to defend wilderness reached its zenith. More preserves, wildernesses, National Parks and Monuments formed out of campaigns by environmental groups than ever as America’s leaders and people saw natural landscapes through a “new” medium. During the heyday of the Sierra Club publishing program, Club membership grew exponentially. The first book in the series, This Is The American Earth featured primarily the work of Ansel Adams though other well-known western photographers such as Eliot Porter, Philip Hyde, Edward Weston, Pirkle Jones, Minor White and Cedric Wright had one or two photographs. Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter and Philip Hyde became the primary illustrators of the series. Dad’s photographs in particular, appeared in eight out of the sixteen books published in the sequence. Several volumes in the series became bestsellers and this combined with Washington DC lobbying, brought the Sierra Club into national prominence.

After marrying in June 1947, Dad and Mom joined the Sierra Club later that year while Dad started photography school. The Club had just over 900 members, but within the next two decades the ranks swelled to over one million. Other conservation organizations like the Wilderness Society also grew exponentially and many new organizations formed.

Photography itself had undergone a transformation as well. Soft focus pictorialism dominated the first third of the 1900s. Few photographers successfully bucked the trend toward printing on canvas and other art papers, soft focus and special effects that made photographs resemble paintings, until Alfred Stieglitz published a magazine called Camera Work in which he began to encourage what he called “straight photography.” Photographers in the Western United States increasingly made photographs of landscapes without people. Only a few pioneers had captured landscapes previously, they were not common. In 1932 photographers Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Henry Swift, Sonya Noskowiak, John Paul Edwards and Ansel Adams formed Group f.64 in San Francisco. Named after f.64, the smallest lens setting enabling the most detail in a photograph, the group composed a manifesto limiting “members and invitational names to those workers who are striving to define photography as an art form by simple and direct presentation through purely photographic methods… Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form.”

In the mid 1940s, Group f.64 member Ansel Adams founded a fine art Photography Department, the first ever of its kind, at the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Arts Institute. When Ansel Adams first started the department, students of painting, sculpture and other disciplines erupted into a school-wide protest against photography being part of a fine art school. In those days, photography was not considered an art form, let alone a fine art. Yet Ansel Adams persisted with encouragement and support from San Francisco art patron Albert Bender and other California art movers, as well as fellow photographers such as Paul Strand in the Midwest, whose work appeared in Camera Work, and from Alfred Stieglitz himself. Group f.64 members Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham helped teach at the California School of Fine Arts. Besides Philip Hyde, the program turned out such notable photographers as Pirkle Jones, Ruth-Marion Baruch, Charles Wong, Bill Heick, Cameron Macaulay, Benjamen Chinn, Don Whyte, Rose Mandel, Bob Hollingsworth, Stan Zrnich, Pat Harris Noyes, David Johnson, Ira Latour, Gerald Ratto, John Upton, Walter Stoy, and others.

With three years of photography school and a certificate of completion, Dad built on what became known as the west coast tradition and went on to influence a generation of nature photographers with his simple, understated forms and subtle desert and mountain landscapes.

“Dear Phil,” Minor White, lead instructor at CSFA, wrote in a letter to Dad in 1950, “Your pictures are as clean as Ansel’s, with a slant of your own seeing. You are starting your career as few of my students have done. In a way I envy your present mastery of the medium…”

By 1971, Ansel Adams wrote that Philip Hyde was “one of the very best photographers of the natural scene in America.” Ansel Adams said he liked Dad’s photograph, “The Minarets from Tarn Above Lake Ediza,” better than his own photograph of the Minarets in the Ansel Adams Wilderness. In 1999, American Photo Magazine named Dad’s “Cathedral in the Desert, Glen Canyon” one of the top 100 photographs of the 20th Century. Dad’s work appeared in more than 75 books, 130 newspapers, 100 exhibitions and over 60 magazines including Audubon, Wilderness, Life, National Geographic, Aperture, Newsweek, Time and Reader’s Digest. He has received many awards including one for lifetime achievement from the North American Nature Photography Association in 1996 and the Albert Bender Award in 1956. The principal artist in over a dozen books, he also wrote magazine articles and an autobiographical essay to accompany his photographs and the writings he selected of John Muir’s in The Range of Light (1992). Dad wrote the text for Drylands: The Deserts of North America (1987), which won three literary awards. Beginning in the 1970s he taught photographic workshops for more than 30 years for organizations such as the Museum of Northern Arizona, John Sexton Workshops, Ansel Adams Gallery Workshops in Yosemite and many other schools of photography.

Dad and Mom stand as examples of how to tread lightly on the earth and find satisfaction in a simple self-sufficient lifestyle. Early in Dad’s career he made a decision to live in the mountains of Northeastern California far away from the photography marketplace. By living in such a remote place, he also gave up the opportunity to be more involved in the Sierra Club and other organizations. With fewer book signings, gallery openings and connections he sacrificed greater financial success to live close to nature.

Mom worked by his side from the beginning. While he attended the California School of Fine Art she worked as the receptionist at the school. Later she became known as an excellent kindergarten teacher and was renowned in the mountain valleys of Plumas County for her knowledge of birds, plants, organic gardening and natural cuisine long before it became popular. Dad thought he would go on working and making photographs his entire life, but in the summer of 1999 he began to lose his eyesight, and within a year he was completely blind.

Virginia Creeper, Northern Sierra Nevada, California, 1977, by Philip Hyde. Made more magazine covers than any other Philip Hyde photograph. Example of Straight Photography and colorful enough without amping up the saturation.

Yet Dad proved there is more to vision than eyes and more to seeing than vision. He was one of the first to visualize a civilization in harmony with all life rather than exploiting the Earth as a commodity. In his photography training, as in any good art training, he learned to see deeply. Photography is the art of seeing patterns, forms, relationships that the untrained eye would not see. One day in 1987 he slowed his gait as he passed through our yard at home. He stared at the Virginia Creeper Vines against the weathered gray cedar siding of the house he built. Besides autumn reds, yellows and oranges contrasting with unturned green leaves, some of the leaves reflected blue from the sky. Most eyes do not notice the blue because we automatically edit it to green, the expected color for leaves without the reflected sheen. He ran inside and gathered his wooden Reis tripod and 4X5 Baby Deardorf view camera and set up on our front lawn for one of his most widely-published and exhibited photographs.

By late 2001, his 58-year photography career ended suddenly as his sight fully faded to black and he could no longer make photographs or even print them in his darkroom. Mom acted as his guide, business manager and constant companion. She tried to do the work of two people, keeping up with the photography business and finances as well as maintaining the grounds, house and kitchen. Then the second devastation arrived, Mom died suddenly in March 2002.When she passed on, I moved back to the mountain home where I was born, from my place across the country in upstate New York. We cried, reminisced and cried some more. Sometimes we screamed into the lonely woods, at the sky, at the stars, but the night absorbed it all. In time we began to talk on tape about the many wilderness miles we walked together. Dad described his adventures with Mom seeking the “Good Life” while helping to protect such places as Dinosaur National Monument, The Grand Canyon, The California Redwoods, and many other seashores and wilderness areas of the American West.

Until his death in 2006, I read him the environmental news almost daily. He relied on dreams for glimpses of the natural world he spent a lifetime defending. We sought to make sense of the loss of my mother; the loss of Dad’s eyesight and the state of environmental decline and violence the world is in today. Dad sometimes wondered why he worked so hard. Unfortunately environmental battles are never won, they are merely postponed. The dam site is still there, the mineral resources are still in the ground, the trees are still uncut, the road plans may some day yet destroy the pristine meadow. The beaches are always ripe for new hotels and condominiums. Nonetheless Dad saw clearly two possible visions for the future. In one we continue to poison our home until we destroy ourselves. In the other we learn to live in harmony with life and sustain ourselves on this planet perpetually. In the chapters that follow, I retrace the wanderings of Ardis and Philip and sometimes me tagging along, throughout the wilds on an odyssey through remote terrain from Alaska to Switzerland to Mexico to Southern Utah, my dad’s favorite state besides his home in the mountains of Northern California. All with the purpose of offering a glimpse of how one family lived and did what they could to make a difference and inspire others to do the same, to bring about the future with the most possibilities.

From 58 Years In The Wilderness:
The Story of Ardis and Philip Hyde Traveling, Defending and Living in the Wilderness

Introduction First Draft

Two days of rain battered our white plastic rain fly. The 20-foot-square white tarp hung from ropes tied to trees on the two diagonal corners and to stakes in the ground on the remaining corners. Under the tarp our orange four-man tent billowed in gusts of wind.

I snuggled into my down sleeping bag in the tent and listened to the drone of rain. Just outside the front flap of the tent, though well under the rain fly, squatted Mom. She held a Sierra Club cup with a decaf coffee freshly poured from the small teapot on the grate down at the fire.

It was April 1970 and we were backpacking in Coyote Gulch in the Escalante Wilderness, Utah in an area that later became inaccessible as the waters of “Lake” Powell drowned the mouth of Coyote Gulch. My dad, Philip Hyde, a freelance landscape photographer, often worked with the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations such as the Wilderness Society and National Audubon. He found out about this spectacular red-walled canyon full of arches, overhangs and green seeps slipping over hidden ledges, because the area was part of a proposed wilderness and more than once put forward as a potential National Park. By 1970 Dad’s photographs had already appeared in dozens of books and before the United States Congress, Senate and many other state and local political leaders on behalf of wild lands all over the Western U.S. His photographs were applied to more environmental campaigns than those of any other photographer of his time.

The wind picked up and the rain fly pelted the tent roof, keeping me from dozing off and getting my daily nap I usually had in the afternoon at age five.

“Where’s Daddy-O?” I asked, up on an elbow to see Mom.

“He’s getting firewood.”

“In the rain?”

“He must have had to go farther than expected and decided to hole up under an overhang or something,” Mom said.

“Hmm. I hope he’s all right.”

“Now David, your father is a very capable man. Do you want more hot chocolate?”

“Yeah,” I sat up, pulled my Sierra Club cup out and held it up to her.

“Say please,” she responded.

“Please,” I said.

She carried my cup down to the fire in the rain, balanced it on a rock, lifted the larger kettle from the campfire with pliers, tilted it and poured into my cup spilling only slightly. She delivered the hot chocolate to me, safely squatting and dry still just inside the tent and without shoes.

“Let that cool again now,” she said.

“OK,” I said, balancing the cup to the side and scrunching back down into my bag. “It seems pretty dark.”

“There is plenty of light left,” she said.

The wind and rain blended into a rising roar. I was back down into my bag but up on my elbows. I shivered though I was a mummy in down. I sipped tiny scalding tastes of hot chocolate. The light from the campfire flashed and flickered dimly on the tent ceiling. The shadows deepened. Every few seconds I heard the splitting of limbs or the thunk of twigs on the tarp. The fresh smell of masses of water pounding sand and sandstone was punctuated with bursts of lightning followed by deafening cracks in the sky.

Just then Dad appeared with a large arm-full of wood.

“You sure are soaking wet,” Mom said. “Why don’t you come in and take off those wet clothes?”

“I need to get a few more armloads of wood,” he said. He began to jog off into the rain but she stopped him.

“Philip?”

“Ardis?”

“There’s hot chocolate here,”

“Ummm,” he said kissing her quickly on the lips and running. “Thank you love, I’ll have some in just a minute.”

I snuggled deeper. Mom poked the fire. The rain fell even harder. It seemed the raindrops were bunching together in torrents and falling like waterfalls on the flap bucking in the wind.

Mom never doubted Dad’s capabilities. She added her talents to the collaboration perfected and imperfected by time and exposure to a spectrum of weather conditions. Dad fixed flat tires, dead batteries and broken equipment with patience, ingenuity and often little resources. Mom planned and prepared. She managed the food and supplies. She supported emotionally, physically and spiritually. She kept the daily trip logs, read the guidebooks and for fun studied plants, animals and especially birds.

Preparing for excursions, Dad studied the geology of the area he would scour for picture possibilities. In the field he knew the weather. On his studio wall he kept a chart of more than 20 types of clouds. He could often accurately predict the weather by looking at the sky or indicators like the barometer and thermometer. He kept a constant vigil for the light and atmospheric conditions favorable to photography.

From their marriage on June 29, 1947, until Dad began to lose his eyesight in 1999, he spent an average of 99 days a year in the field. Mom accompanied him more than half the time. They traveled mainly between April and October in the Western United States camping, backpacking, driving, riding horses, mules, trains, planes and boats to access wilderness for almost one third of every year of his working life. Summers were not the best months for photographs, but that was mainly when he traveled, so that Mom could go along in her time off from teaching kindergarten.

The summer of 1955 was typical of Dad’s early career. After buying a 1954 Chevrolet Pickup in March from Brett Weston, a contemporary photographer, Mom and Dad spent 12 days in April in the California Redwoods, across the state, 300 miles west of their home in the mountains of Northeastern California. Then Dad turned around and journeyed alone 600 miles south of home, May 3-14 to photograph Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. Continuously for the next three months Mom and Dad backpacked, camped, river rafted and drove thousands of miles through Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. This included three river trips: 13 days on the Colorado River through little known Glen Canyon, 26 days on the Yampa River in Utah and Wyoming inside Dinosaur National Park, and five days on the Ladore River, also in Dinosaur. By August 16, after three weeks in Wyoming in Yellowstone National Park and Grand Tetons National Park on a Sierra Club Pack Trip, Mom got a ride home with participants, but Dad continued on to Glacier National Park, Montana for 10 days and Olympic National Park, Washington for two more weeks. Dad did not see home until September 10.

Why did the pair spend one third of their lives pursuing this unusual brand of adventure? (Rhetoric question. Part of the text.)